A month late, it’s time to blog about the 2024 SOlo National Championships…
Why did this post take so long? Well immediately after Nationals I got home and continued to work on photos from my RainbowMarks Photography business. It was a good week in Lincoln, I took something like 28k photos and posted a large number of those online for the world to see (and buy).
I managed to presell enough photo packages to make the work required to take photos of every individual competing at Nationals (barring those in 5th heats when I was working or running myself) worth it. Overall the photography experience was fun, but a crap ton of work. I likely won’t shoot every car/competitor possible again, but never say never. More on what photos for the 2024 Solo Nationals sometime next summer!
So let’s talk about the 2024 Solo Nationals experience, outside of the photo side of things.
Preparation for the 2024 Solo Nationals
Prep for this year’s Nationals consisted of me heading to Houston for work a couple of days before I was heading to Lincoln, so mostly Thursday night and Friday I madly scrambled to get everything packed up. The beauty of co-driving with someone like Dave is that you don’t have to bring much with you, he’s got the car/trailer and all the supplies, so really most of my packing was related to camera/photography needs, along with the usual autocross supplies of clothing, sunscreen, helmet and racing shoes. I filled the back of the F250 with tubs full of stuff, as usual, and managed to not use most of it, also as usual.
Travelling to Lincoln
Friday morning I hit the road towards Lincoln. I had intended to go the northern route from St. Louis, skipping I-70 in favor of MO-36, basically heading north to Hannibal and then west. The problem was I just went through the motions and turned west on I-70 without thinking about it and made my way towards Kansas City the usual way. The trip was uneventful, no incidents of traffic outside of some construction west of KC, but Waze had me jump off the highway to avoid most of that.
I arrived in Lincoln Friday afternoon and was able to get situated with Dave and Beth at the Solo Performance trailer for the week.
Saturday’s CAM Invitational
Saturday over on what was partially the pracitce course for the week was the CAM Invitational, an event put together for the CAM and XA/XB Classes to allow for a year end culmination of CAM events. Dave, Beth and I took part in the invitational and shootout. During the invitational portion of the event I performed pretty poorly, finishing 8th in CAMS outside of the trophies with cones on a number of my runs. Dave finished 2nd for that portion of the event. The shootout went a bit better, but I’ll be honest, I can’t exactly remember where I ended up and the results online don’t show anything actually useful in terms of who finished where, but I’m pretty sure I beat Dave, maybe.
Museum of Speed
Saturday evening the CAM Competitors were invited to the Museum of Speed from Speedway Motors, which if you’ve never visited is a must see in Lincoln Nebraska. It had been years (12?) since I had stepped through the doors there, I was glad that I did this year and spent some time walking around.
Here are some photos I took on my phone at the Museum after the dinner and awards ceremony.
Tuesday and Wednesday competition at the Solo Nationals
CAM-C ran on Tuesday/Wednesday of the week of Nationals, late in the day. So we had plenty of time to get course walks in. I actually didn’t walk as much this year as I have in the past, I managed 3 walks of our first course on Monday I believe, along with 2 walks early Tuesday morning. Tuesday evening I walked day 2’s course twice and then repeated that again Wednesday morning.
Overall with the results I was pleased, I got my 3rd National trophy with a 6th place finish in CAM-C, but I was sitting in 5th after Day 1. Day 2 I managed to only get a clean run on the first run, so I wasn’t able to defend that 5th place spot.
Dave ended up in 4th for the event, 2 trophies ahead of me. Here are some videos of our 2024 Solo Nationals runs.
Dave West Course Fastest Run 52.457
Chris West Course Fastest Run 52.511
Dave East Course Fastest Run 67.429
Chris East Course Fastest Run 52:457
Thursday and Friday
Running on Tuesday and Wednesday frees us up for Thursday and Friday. I was announcing the 5th heat on Thursday/Friday for my work assignment, so I shot photos most of the day then got myself ready for the runs I was covering. I ended up announcing for FSAEL, GS, STH and a couple of other classes I’m forgetting :D
Nothing too eventful happened, but it was great to get to call Evan William’s G Street win!
What’s next?
So what’s coming next? Well, the next weekend after Nationals I ran a local event in an AS Z06, that was fun! I am leaning towards running in SSC again in 2025 though, so I will be working on purchasing a new ride for that endeavor hopefully in the next month or two!